We Need to Talk: Justice

Jean Dubofsky was the first woman to become a Colorado Supreme Court Justice and a former Deputy Attorney General for Colorado. She was the lead attorney in the case that overturned Colorado Amendment 2 in the US Supreme Court, resulting in a landmark ruling for LGBT rights in the United States. As such, she is qualified to talk about the concept of justice. She’ll be doing that on Monday October 1st as part of a panel discussion on justice in the We Need to Talk series happening at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder.

“Justice to me means is what people think they’ll get from the judicial system. There’s justice in the generic sense, when people say, “oh this is just or it’s not just,” but from a judicial system people think any problem they have will be resolved in their favor and that will be justice. It doesn’t happen that way and I think most people are disappointed in the results they get from a court system because they think they’re in the right and they’re going to win and it doesn’t work that way. Some win, some lose, but most cases come out somewhere in the middle and if your problem is resolved sort of half way, you’re not happy with that.”

Dubofsky thinks that our society is not very just for many people. “At least to certain categories of people. People who have less money who are surrounded more by people who commit crimes, for a whole lot of different reasons groups of people end up being in prison that had they grown up in different circumstances probably would never be there.”